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I'd probably argue that most private industry infrastructure efforts are decidedly not free markets. Given the politics involved in building out large utilities, governments tend to get heavily involved. Around the country this has resulted in some strange relationships between company and government, most involving some manner of limited monopoly in exchange for certain guarantees regarding types of service. Those agreements tend to be short-sighted and rarely updated, leaving us with aging infrastructure and legal impedements to competition.



There are some good and bad reasons for this. For example, the deregulation of electric utilities in California in 1996 was an epic failure. Part of that was due to the design of the deregulation scheme, but a lot of is was attributed to the perverse incentives of the free market.




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